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Defending America in the Twenty-first Century Eliot A. Cohen FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume 79 • Number 6 Foreign Affairs The contents of © 2000 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved. are copyrighted.  N OVEMBER / D ECEMBER 2000

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Defending America in the Twenty-first Century

Eliot A. Cohen

FOREIGNAFFAIRS

Volume 79 • Number 6

Foreign AffairsThe contents of

© 2000 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved.

are copyrighted.

N OVEMBER/D ECEMBER2000

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what’s wrong with this picture?

Last year, the U.S. military looked something like this: it had1,380,000 troops, a budget of some $279 billion, and featured 10 activeArmy and three active Marine Corps divisions, about 20 active andreserve air wings, and 11 active aircraft carriers. Its forces drovem-1tanks, ew f -15 and f -16 ghters and f -117 bombers, and sailedNimitz-class carriers. They were organized into unied and speciedcommands, governed primarily by the Goldwater-Nichols Departmentof Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.

Ten years earlier—with the Soviet Union still standing and theGulf War soon to begin—the picture was strangely similar. The U.S.military had slightly over two million troops. With a budget of $382.5billion (in today’s dollars), it had 18 active Army and 3 active MarineCorps divisions, 36 active and reserve air wings, and 14 carriers. Its troopsdrovem-1 tanks, ew f-15 andf-16 ghters andf-117 bombers, and sailedNimitz-class carriers. They too were organized into unied and speciedcommands, governed primarily by the Goldwater-Nichols Act.

To be fair, the Pentagon did make some changes in the interim. The American military presence in Europe shrank to something likea third of its late–Cold War size—down to roughly 100,000 troops.Some organizations disappeared (most notably the Air Force’s nuclear-armed Strategic Air Command), while others expanded in size andinuence. Precision-guided missiles and bombs, once a small portion

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Defending America

in the Twenty-rst Century Eliot A. Cohen

Eliot A. Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. NitzeSchool of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

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command structure conceived in 1943 and a recruitment and personnelsystem begun in 1970) out of touch with today’s needs.

The next U.S. president—whether Gore or Bush—and his admin-istration will get the chance to change all of this. But they are unlikely

to do so, since inertia overwhelms the impulse to change at the Pentagon.Having won its wars cheaply (if not decisively), buttressed by formal andinformal lobbies that understand their interests well, and led by compe-tent but harried men and women who have neither the time nor theinclination to question their institutions’ methods of doing business,the military will resist transformation. This may seem understandableat rst, for failing to reform will not incur any visible penalty in the nextve or ten years. Indeed, making changes will most assuredly cause short-

term pain. But the costs of not reconguring the U.S. military now aresteep and are likely to emerge in the coming decades. The country willmiss out on important foreign policy objectives, and American power will fail to sustain the global semi-peace that we now take for granted.

four ways to fightIn 1989,the Bush administration began demobilizing from the Cold

War. Its basic concept was simple: the American military wouldslowly shrink by roughly 25 or 30 percent while maintaining a highoperations tempo and reasonably generous pay, benets, and researchand development budgets. But it would slow the acquisition of military hardware. This was a cautious policy for a cautious administrationthat was not entirely convinced that the Soviet Union (or its successor,Russia) was down for the count. The Base Force, as the new conceptbecame known, was a stopgap to remain until the Russian threat was

clearly gone; it seemed a prudent approach for a government thatdreaded the precipitate and feckless demobilizations that (it believed)had followed past conicts.

A decade later, although Russia is no longer a threat, the BaseForce remains alive and well, albeit under a diªerent guise. Following thelogic of the so-called Bottom-up Review of the early Clinton admin-istration and then the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, Americanforces now aim at ghting two “major theater wars” (mtw s)—presumably against North Korea and Iraq. America’s conventional force

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structure has been built toward this goal, and nuclear policy has beenconsigned to the realms of arms control and unilateral disarmament. The two- mtw strategy requires almost the same force structure as

did the Base Force; a dispassionate observer would be hard pressed tosee much diªerence between the two. And neither strategy su⁄cestoday. For one thing, the defense budget simply cannot sustain thecurrent military without substantial increases: for a decade now the Pentagon has not had enough money to replace the aging hardware

that it uses around the world. Estimates of the shortfall range from$25 billion a year to three times that gure (the latest assessment from theCongressional Budget O⁄ce comes in at about $50 billion a year).But even adequate funding would not solve the problem. More thanmoney, an entirely new strategy is needed, one that does not cling toone obsolete scenario (an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia) or to a threatthat may collapse within a few years (North Korea). The UnitedStates needs a strategy that realistically addresses all of America’schallenges in the next decade and beyond.

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corbis-bettmann

Still ghting the last war: U.S. soldiers in Iraq, 1991

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Unfortunately, the current system will not produce such a new strategy. This is because it remains captive to an excruciating bureau-cratic process: the congressionally mandated Quadrennial DefenseReview, which, at least in the last round, ended in a document composed

by scores of subpanels of o⁄cers and civil servants, who reported toseven panels, who reported to an “integration group,” who reportedto a “Senior Steering Group,” who, aided or screened by the chairman

of the Joint Chiefs of Staª, reported to thesecretary of defense. Nor will the new strategy come from external studies by commissionsacting without real authority or responsibility, worthy and wise though their participants may

be. Rather, crafting a new strategy requires asmall civilian and military staª workingdirectly for the secretary of defense, pro-

tected from normal bureaucratic pressures and willing to make somehard calls. A successful new defense strategy must recognize America’sextraordinary role in international politics and the consequent ambiguity and uncertainty of the circumstances in which the United States willuse its military power.

The resulting strategy should have the following four components:defense against weapons of mass destruction (wmd), conventionaldominance, short-term contingencies, and peace maintenance.

Defense againstwmd should supplement traditional nuclear strategy with national missile defense and domestic counterterrorism. To beeªective, defense against wmd sometimes requires the military tocooperate with other government agencies, or even to let them takethe lead. Already the Pentagon works with organizations such as the

Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare forwmd attackson American cities, and there has been talk about—and some actiontoward—preparing the National Guard to provide rst-responseunits for biological attacks against American cities. Depending onthe level of threat that actually materializes, however, the UnitedStates may eventually adopt far more comprehensive measures toprotect its borders.

An eªective national missile defense may eventually require theUnited States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (abm)

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National missiledefense has become a question of theology,not policy.

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Treaty—an entirely legal option under the treaty’s terms—if it provesimpossible to negotiate major changes. The moment for such a withdrawal has not yet arrived, however. National missile defense hasbecome a question of theology rather than policy, especially in an

election year. President Clinton was probably right to defer the naldecision on this matter, but sooner or later the di⁄cult choice willhave to be made.Nmd will make sense only if it oªers protection, notonly against the odd missile from North Korea, Iraq, or Iran, butagainst America’s main rival—China. Finally, a revised Pentagonstrategy must acknowledge that the American nuclear arsenal will againbecome an essential element in defense against and deterrence of wmdattacks against the American homeland.

Achieving conventional dominance, meanwhile, means developinglong-term superiority over any potential opponent. This will requireinvestment not only in research and development, but also in actualsystems. It may also mean stepping back from traditional but aging weapons systems such as the aircraft carrier or the main battle tank.But these will be prices worth paying. The objective should be to have—and no less important, to be seen to have—a decisive edge over any major competitor, most likely China. To remain dominant over China,

the United States must not only shift its attention to the Pacic but alsostart thinking in entirely new ways about technology, logistics, andoperations. For nearly half a century, the American military organizeditself to ght a short, extremely intense battle in Europe from large,xed bases dispersed over relatively short distances. Whatever a future war in Asia might look like, that will not be it. Winning a conict inAsia will mean long-range warfare, with dispersed, mobile, or con-cealed basing, and the kinds of forces that can sustain a long, perhaps

only intermittently violent, clash in the air, at sea, and in space.Short-term contingencies are the kinds of conventional conictsuntil now covered under the two-mtw concept. But whereas thatconstruct is based on the Gulf War case—envisioning the deploymentof a massive, armor-heavy force supported by a vast eet and hundredsor thousands of aircraft—what is needed now is a much more precisely dened set of scenarios, such as defense against Iraqi or Iranianaggression in the Gulf, against a North Korean attack on SouthKorea, and, conceivably, the ability to respond to overt Russian action

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against new nato members. In each case, the kinds of forces needed will be fewer than those posited in current planning.

Finally, the United States needs a real peace-maintenance strategy.International police work is the wayward child that the Pentagon

cannot decide whether to embrace (because it is the only job imme-diately available and because it justies the current force structure) orreject (because it conicts with Cold War concepts of what the military exists to do). Posturing by both parties has made the problem worse,as Republicans insist that they would walk away from all peacekeepingor peace-enforcement missions, whereas Democrats are too eager toaccept such involvements without conceding the long-term problemsthey pose for the defense establishment.

Executing all four types of missions outlined above will involvemaking tradeoªs, which current Pentagon models do not accept—atleast in a forthright way. For example, the kinds of units required forpeacekeeping—military police, civil aªairs detachments, even lowly water-purication units—are very diªerent from those needed forconventional warfare. Training for and conducting operations thatemphasize political action with only severely limited uses of forceover long periods of time is at odds with the fast and intense bursts

of violence that work best in conventional war. What will make such a four-pronged strategy even more di⁄cultto prepare for are the political obstacles to speaking plainly aboutthese issues. To openly accept America’s long-term peacekeeping roleis to expose oneself to a barrage of criticism from Capitol Hill—evenif the party in opposition would otherwise be just as likely to sendpeacekeepers abroad as one’s own. Meanwhile, justifying long-terminvestments in conventional military power will mean naming potential

opponents. That will be no small feat. Even during the Cold War, thePentagon sometimes resorted to a coy euphemism, “the Threat,” when talking about the Soviet Union. Today a far greater di⁄culty looms, for China is not simply an adversary: the United States has alarge economic interest in its well-being. Identifying it as America’sprimary strategic opponent will provoke the ire not merely of those who think goodwill can reduce or eliminate the need for saber-rattling,but also of the bankers, merchants, entrepreneurs, and managers of multi-billion-dollar companies who see China as a market of unlimited

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potential. China’s leaders, talented as they are at manipulating foreigners’guilt and greed, will play to the ambivalence, anxiety, and avarice of the West, aided by some of the most talented lobbyists money can buy.Like it or not, the United States must identify its potential competitors

or opponents by name. Unless it does, Washington will continue tobuy the wrong hardware for the wrong war.

better buyingAlthough Pentagon planning documents and reporting seem torecognize that the Cold War is indeed long gone, in truth it lives on—even in the subtle metal alloys, exotic carbon bers, and superabundant

silicon chips that make up America’s machines of war. The Army, forexample, still wants to buy a 55-ton self-propelled howitzer—eventhough it could hardly hope to deploy it in a timely or ample fashionto the obscure parts of the world where it will actually have to go. At thesame time, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps still hope to spendabout $200 billion on the joint strike ghter—a short-range airplanethat can deliver only limited quantities of ordnance on target and that would probably be inadequate for the long-range missions ahead.

To be fair, military technology often serves functions that the originaldesigners and manufacturers never even imagined. Still, hardware isthe inanimate reection of strategic assumptions. For half a century,those assumptions were that the United States would ght the next war from extensive xed bases in Western Europe, against a largeconventional force attacking in a relatively compact and heavily built-uplandscape. But those assumptions now need to change. And new equipment must take advantage of contemporary technologies.

As it stands, the American military’s current hardware is suited toonly one of today’s four main missions: ghting short-term conicts. Yet the military will have problems with even that. The hardwarerequires relatively long periods of time to deploy or pre-position inquantity in distant theaters. It also requires ample logistical supportand secure base areas. The vast supply dumps of the Gulf War andthe crowded taxiways of the Aviano air base during the Kosovoconict typify that old American way of waging war—and its vulnerability as well.

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As for the other three strategic missions that the United States shouldbe preparing for, these will require very diªerent kinds of technology.Homeland defense, the rst of these missions, will call for not only some kind of national missile defense, but also industrial resources

and stockpiles of both mundane and exotic items—vaccines, protectivesuits, and all the other paraphernalia neededfor what is known as “consequence manage-ment.” Conventional dominance, particularly against China, will involve long-range forces,primarily aerial and naval, that could cope with events such as an assault on Taiwan.U.S. conventional forces should be tailored

to handle the vast distances and more com-plicated basing problems of the Pacic,rather than the well-developed and more

familiar terrain of Europe and the Persian Gulf. As for peace main-tenance, this requires long-endurance manned or unmanned aircraftto monitor and control airspace (as the United States has done foralmost a decade now in Iraq), surveillance and monitoring equip-ment, and a kit for urban warfare not yet seen in the dusty valley of

the Army’s National Training Center. To start making these changes, the next U.S. administration shouldrst make some dramatic cancellations. Crusader (the Army’s monsterartillery piece) and the joint strike ghter are two prime candidates forsuch cuts. Meanwhile, theb-2 production line may need to be reopened,a variety of unmanned aerial vehicle programs should be pressed, andthe Navy should be compelled to experiment with the arsenal ship—alarge container for various cruise and ballistic missiles that are invaluable

for the kinds of strike missions that have characterized real (as opposedto hypothesized) missions in the past decade. Even if the defense budgetgoes up, as it ought to, the ruthless retirement of old systems (such asthe creaky b-52 bomber, older generationm-1 tanks, and squadrons of f-16s) will help pay for the new systems. More important, purging obso-lete hardware will show the armed services and the defense industry that Washington is nally serious about the “revolution in military aªairs.”

To construct the hardware it needs, the U.S. military must moreeªectively tap the exploding civilian technology market. In doing so,

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Cancelling obsolete weapons programs willshow the defenseindustry that this

revolution is for real.

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however, it will need to bear at least two things in mind. First, exper-imental technology is just that—experimental, and thus prone to(sometimes expensive) failures. Yet the current research and developmentsystem has nothing like the tolerance for risk that characterized the

American military-industrial complex in the 1950s and 1960s, whenextraordinarily complex systems like the Polaris sea-launched missileand its land-based counterpart, the Minuteman, went from conceptto operating capability in roughly ve years. Moreover, for experimentaltechnologies to work, they must be tested in the eld, and in numberslarge enough for troops to learn how to use them. Simply spendingmoney on R&D but then skimping on acquisition until a crisis arises would do a disservice both to the defense industry, which makes

money on production, not R&D, and to the military itself, whichtrusts only hardware it has used in the eld.Second, Washington should recognize how the defense industry

has changed. The pell-mell consolidation of the defense establishmentin the last decade has produced a much smaller yet more unwieldy and far more conservative military-industrial complex than existedever before. Washington should take note of this trend and its con-sequences and ensure that from now on it has at least two suppliers

of military aircraft, advanced electronics, and large ships. The military is almost the only buyer in the U.S. defense market. Its indiªerenceto the contraction of its supplier base has left it captive to a handfulof large companies that make their money not by coming up with new products, but by churning out old ones.

people power

Getting the right equipment will be hard enough. But thePentagon’s largest challenge lies at its heart: how to reform the structures within which it operates and that govern the 1,380,000 people wholl its ranks in uniform and its 700,000 civilian employees. Problemstoday exist at three levels: the very top, the intermediate institutionsof the services and their large commands, and the individual personnelsystem. All three need to change.

The leadership structure of today’s military was molded by theGoldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of

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1986. The law strengthened the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staª and the Joint Staª at the expense of the individual services and,unintentionally, of the O⁄ce of the Secretary of Defense (osd ). Thisreorganization fullled a vision rst conceived by General George C.

Marshall and the Army staª in the midst of World War II: a powerful,centralized military command in Washington presiding over theatercommanders in chief who wield a great deal of inuence over localmatters and, less directly, over defense policy at home.

In the years since 1986, proponents and critics of the Goldwater-Nichols Act have overstated both its good and bad points. The actdid, to some extent, abate the mixture of deadlock and compromisethat made getting crisp military advice from service chiefs a frustrating

aªair. It also ratied, symbolically and practically, a simple fact: theservices would henceforth begin overlapping and interacting to anever greater extent. It made the Joint Staª—the bureaucracy of o⁄cers from all services who constitute the country’s central military staª—report directly to the chairman, turning it into a far more eªectiveorganization. And it gave a voice to theater commanders who couldnow exercise unied control over the forces in their arena withouthaving to wage guerrilla warfare against service chiefs in Washington.

These were all very real benets. The act’s negative consequences, however, were no less real. By making “jointness” (that is, inter-service cooperation) a matter of dogma rather than good sense in all cases, it paved the way formore logrolling, favor-trading, and a least-common-denominatorapproach. It does not always make sense for the diªerent branchesof the military to work together. There are, for example, many cases in which the needs of the diªerent services mandate disparate

approaches to the acquisition of military technology (unmannedaircraft being one such instance where the requirements of the fourservices diªer utterly).

The act also threatened to reduce to one (namely, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs) the channels for giving military advice to civilianleadership. Under the act, the chairman can eªectively exclude theindividual service chiefs of staª from advising the secretary of defense.By elevating the Joint Staª without also strengthening theosd , thelegislation actually weakened civilian power and authority—to the point

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that the osd and Joint Staª often attend interagency meetings oªeringseparate Department of Defense views on what ought to be done.

By increasing the inuence and prestige of the theater commandersin chief—who focus, understandably, on the emergencies of the moment

and the likely contingencies of the next year or two (their tour of duty)—the act also undermined advocates of long-term investmentand experimentation, who traditionally reside in the service bureau-cracies. Finally, the legislation created a joint o⁄cer promotion systemthat rewards ticket-punching tours on staªsover eld command, creating a personnelsystem that was not only inexible, but alsobiased against operational expertise.

Given these aws, the time is now ripe fora revision of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Itsdeformation of the personnel system, in par-ticular, requires examination—especially itsrigid requirements for so-called joint tours. The emergence in Sep-tember 1999 of a Joint Forces Command as the nominal proponent forlong-term defense innovation also needs review. In theory, the jfcshould be the incubator of military experimentation and innovation; in

practice, it has not served that function, nor has it done much morethan serve as an irritant to service initiatives along the same lines.Although the role of the chairman as the leading military adviser tothe government should be preserved, revised legislation should give thecivilian leadership more leeway to turn to other senior military guresfor consultation. Furthermore, means must be found to strengthen theO⁄ce of the Secretary of Defense, including making it more attractiveto senior civil servants and streamlining the processes of appointing

qualied political candidates. The individual services—which for more than two decades now have been cast as the myopic and parochial enemies of sound military policy—still retain responsibility to train and equip their forces. Thisis as it should be. Despite criticism, most notably from Admiral William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staª, theservices remain the custodians of military culture, training and education,basic technology development and acquisition, and, most important,the long view of military power. “Jointness” notwithstanding, the

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The four services willremain the foundations

of U.S. military powerlong into the future.

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individual services will remain the foundations of military organizationas far as the eye can see. The truth is that the physical environments in which the armed forces operate diªer radically from one another, and what sometimes goes by the name of parochialism is often a ratio-

nal—if occasionally narrow—reaction to the diªerent challengesposed by operating at sea, on the land, or in the air. The problem with today’s military, then, is not the fact that it has

discrete services, but the fact that segments of the services often work at cross-purposes. The services cling to established ways of war, andto combinations of technology, organization, and personnel systemsthat have come to acquire value in and of themselves—even if they are no longer entirely functional. At the same time, each service contains

dissident or innovative groups of o⁄cers who are keen to experiment with new techniques that might cause as great a dislocation as themechanization of horse cavalry, say, or the displacement of the battle-ship by the aircraft carrier. Civilian leaders should cultivate and supportthese innovators. Some Air Force generals are eager to see unmannedaerial vehicles supplement if not replace ghter aircraft; some Army generals would replace traditional heavy forces with hybrids of lightinfantry and long-range precision-re systems; some admirals would

invest in otillas of semi-submersible ships that would serve as littlemore than barges carrying dense arrays of cruise and ballistic missiles.Behind them are far greater numbers of junior o⁄cers ready toexperiment with the technologies and operational concepts that canmake such notions reality.

The challenge is not, therefore, to suppress the services, butrather to open them up. And the best way to do this is through theoft-despised service secretaries—the civilian heads of the Army,

Navy, and Air Force. In the past, many of these individuals receivedtheir positions as political payoªs for party or personal loyalty to thepresident, and many of them limit their role to that of cheerleadersand advocates for the organizations to which they have been assigned.Rarely have they made an enduring mark. Small wonder that reformersoften call for the abolition of these throwbacks to the days beforedefense unication.

But abolition would be an error. The secretaries can provide a new administration with one of its greatest points of leverage in molding

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a new Pentagon—but only if they view their job properly. If they doso, the secretaries can perform two invaluable functions in particular.First, they can serve as impartial observers of institutions that—unlikeso many others in the modern world—are led exclusively by men and

women who have spent their entire working lives in the same institution. The secretaries also can and should enforce the policies of theiradministration on their reluctant service.

Second, the secretaries have the chance to get to know their serviceand its leaders far better than any other civilian. They should thereforebe given the determining voice in selecting o⁄cers for promotion,particularly at the general or admiral ranks. Civilian leaders cannotchange military institutions by at; they must work with like-minded

o⁄cers. It is the business of civilian leaders to pick the right military leaders, and that requires the kind of time and attention that only theservice secretaries—as opposed to the harried secretary of defenseand his or her staª—can provide.

To the extent that civilians can control the Department of Defense,they do so less by issuing edicts (which can be evaded, watered down,or delayed by the military and civil service bureaucracy) than by grooming and selecting internal leadership. But they have another,

often ignored point of purchase: the military’s education system.O⁄cers spend as much as a third of their careers in classrooms. Yet what goes on there receives remarkably little attention from civilianleaders. And when it does get attention, secretaries of defense stillseem more concerned with managing the consequences of 20-year-oldscheating at a service academy than with guring out whether 40-year-olds have thought about improving their professions. Yet never hasmilitary education been more important, for rarely has the quality

of military thought mattered so much. The American military today faces challenges certainly morecomplex, if in some respects less daunting, than those of the Cold War. To understand the politics of obscure corners of the world, tointegrate shimmering, darting information technologies, and tocreate new systems of organization and discipline, the military needsrst-rate thinkers. And yet, when one asks who are America’s strategicthinkers in uniform, one draws a blank. Move beyond the more tech-nical aspects of military craft, and the ranks are dismayingly thin.

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The U.S. military’s educational institutions are relics of the Cold War, devoted primarily to producing well-rounded practitioners, ex-perts in tactics and familiar with the broader aspects of strategy. They are not, however, incubators of military change. Service on their mil-

itary faculties usually indicates a career coming to an end, and o⁄cers who acquire doctorates or write books do so as a hobby—often at theexpense of their careers rather than to theirbenet. Civilian leaders need to review and,if necessary, overhaul the military educationalsystem, particularly for senior o⁄cers. Onestep might be the creation of one or two jointgraduate institutions of military art modeled

on the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies (sams), an elite program for opera-tional planners that follows the standard one year of commandand staª college. Such a school would require stable, possibly civilian, leadership (presidents of the war colleges currently change at least every three years) and should truly integrate theservices—unlikesams or the service war colleges, which meritthorough re-examination themselves.

The low-level recruiting and retention crisis of recent years—much discussed in the presidential campaign—has forced several of the services to either miss their quotas or reduce the quality of thosethey take in. In the late 1990s, the Army and the Navy fell short of recruiting goals by as much as ten percent and were forced to startaccepting non–high school graduates. Attrition rates for o⁄cers of allranks up to colonel rose, as the promising junior and middle managementof the services left early—not because their pay lagged behind the private

sector (although it does, and the diªerentials are growing) but becauseof frustration with the way they were managed and an erosion of funds for high-quality training.

To some extent these problems merely reect the health of theeconomy. But they also result from a deeper malaise and a growingdisjunction between military and civilian life—one that requiresattention. The Navy has only in recent years come around—grudgingly,and with opposition yet to be overcome—to the notion that it makesmore sense to use private contractors to chip paint in port than to

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The military today faceschallenges morecomplex than duringthe Cold War.

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have sailors, some of whom are highly trained technologists, do it. Asthis suggests, the “conscription mentality,” as Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig has called it, is far from dead. The services have yet tocreate personnel structures that would give men and women in uniform

something like the career exibility of their civilian counterparts.Some concepts—lateral entry at the higher ranks, for example, or mov-ing senior o⁄cers across services—may be too much to hope for, butstill merit exploration. The services must also make it easier for youngpeople to serve in the military, leave for a number of years, and return without suªering for so doing.

Most delicate of all, civilian leaders must get at the root of juniorand mid-level o⁄cers’ distrust of the senior leadership—a problem

currently denied at the top but the subject of constant discussionlower down. Radical changes may be under way. The mass army of the nineteenth century drew on large numbers of poorly paid conscriptsor volunteers, managed and trained by noncommissioned o⁄cersand led by middle-class o⁄cers. That model of military personnel works less well today, however. New hybrid kinds of organization—militarized civilian contractors—have emerged to provide logisticalsupport and training, and soon, perhaps, to operate combat systems

as well. This development should be pushed even further, for it isclear that the military life appeals to an ever narrower segment of ahighly developed society.

Today the overburdened American military emphasizes doing,not thinking. Yet never was thinking more necessary. The country’sarmed services are extraordinarily busy. They wage a low-level war inIraq (barely noticed in the newspapers), patrol the streets of Kosovo,cruise the South China Sea, and train peacekeepers for Sierra Leone

and antinarcotics commandos in Colombia. Despite stories aboutsoldiers on food stamps (in most cases, parents with substantialfamilies who had no business joining the military at the bottom tobegin with), they are reasonably, if not lavishly paid. The military’sequipment remains good, if aging. No one else can match its ability to do big things in distant places. Yet it suªers a pervasive, palpablemalaise. Evidence for this abounds: for example, one Army study of o⁄cers at its elite command and staª college concluded, “Top-downloyalty doesn’t exist.… Senior leaders will throw subordinates under

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the bus in a heartbeat to protect or advance their careers.” Such dis-comfort stems from many sources: a sense of relative deprivation,compared to what equally talented people can do in the new Americaneconomy; mistrust of the senior military leadership; uncertainty of

purpose in the absence of an enemy; wearisome deployments; and asense of intellectual and doctrinal stagnation. The next president andsecretary of defense may ignore or paper over these discontents foranother four or eight years; they may also continue to repair, upgrade,and replace the old array of Cold War hardware. Should they continuethe process indenitely, however, a reckoning will come, a humiliation—possibly, a bloody humiliation—for a global hegemonic power thatstill fears to admit to itself that it polices the world.∂

Eliot A. Cohen

[56] foreign affairs . Volume 79 No. 6